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Schiebelhut?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHe doesn’t believe in marriage,” Ramón put in.
    â€œDid you ever ask her to marry you, Ramón?” Sauzas asked him.
    â€œNo,” Ramón said.
    It was an absolute lie, Theodore knew. Ramón had asked her many times. But perhaps through lies they would get at the truth.
    â€œAnd why not?” Sauzas asked.
    â€œBecause I have not the money to support her.” Ramón lifted his head proudly and smiled.
    The knock came again, and a female voice said: “Would you open the door, please?” But no one so much as looked at the door. Theodore recalled that Ramón had asked Lelia to marry him shortly after he, Theodore, had met her. And perhaps that hadn’t been the first time. He wondered if Ramón had asked her again tonight, just before he was due to arrive, and Lelia had refused him. Not that Ramón would have planned it far enough that he was to walk in and be found with her body. No, Ramón did things impulsively. But he might have been angry tonight because she refused him.
    â€œDid Ramón want to marry her, Señor Schiebelhut?” Sauzas asked.
    â€œIt was Lelia who did not want to marry.”
    Sauzas went to the door and opened it very slightly. A shrill duet of female voices began, and he shut the door quickly and leaned against it. “How many other men friends did she have, Señor Schiebelhut?”
    Sauzas simply wanted to label her a whore, Theodore thought, something he was familiar with. “She had many. Many of them are artists—painters like herself.”
    â€œThat she slept with?”
    â€œOh no. None.”
    â€œAnybody who came here frequently? Who might have been in love with her?”
    Theodore thought of one young and struggling painter from Puebla. But he gave that up. It couldn’t have been Eduardo.
    â€œThere weren’t any other men,” Ramón said slowly. “ We were her friends, Theodore and I. The rest were just—”
    â€œBoy friends,” supplied one of the detectives, and all the men except Sauzas and Theodore guffawed at Ramón.
    â€œAny former lovers, then? You two weren’t her first, were you?” Sauzas looked at Ramón.
    Seconds passed, and Theodore said:
    â€œI, at least, have never met any of her former lovers.”
    â€œDo you know the names of any?”
    â€œOnly one—Cristóbol Wagner. She told me he now lives in California.”
    Ramón had plunged his face in his hands. Cristóbol had perhaps been Lelia’s first lover, at any rate the one who counted most. She had told Theodore, and probably Ramón too, that he was the only man she had ever considered marrying. His name, infrequently as Lelia mentioned it, always piqued a little jealousy in Theodore, and no doubt it did in Ramón. Cristóbol had known Lelia from the time she was twenty to twenty-three. Theodore answered Sauzas’s questions about him as correctly as he could. He would be forty now, and he was an architect, and had gone to North America seven years ago and lived in California. As far as Theodore knew, he had never returned to Mexico, and Lelia never wrote to him. For one thing, he was now married and had children. Theodore did not know of any other former lovers in Mexico, but Sauzas kept asking him to rack his memory.
    â€œShe was a painter!” Ramón yelled. “This is her work! Look at it!” He indicated the four walls with a sweep of his arm.
    The men looked about with prejudiced eyes, smiling a little.
    â€œShe was as good as this man here or better!” Ramón said aggressively with a nod at Theodore.
    Now there was a sharper knock at the door. Sauzas went slowly to the door and opened it.
    â€œI am Señorita Ballesteros’s aunt,” a woman’s voice said.
    Theodore went immediately to her. “Tía Josefina,” he said, embracing her and kissing her cheek.
    Lelia’s Aunt